On the morning of 11 November 1918, U.S. Navy sailors elevated a 14-inch/50 caliber Mark IV naval gun to the angle appropriate to hit an assigned target more than 20 miles away. The lieutenant in charge stared at his pocket watch until the time read 1057, then gave the order to fire. The 1,400-pound projectile erupted from the long barrel and soared over the French countryside until it struck the German target just seconds before 1100, the time designated for the armistice to begin.
That final round was appropriate in that it marked the end of a two-decade era in which the U.S. Navy emerged from its previous minor status to become a significant player on the world stage. It was also fittingly symbolic because it had been fired from a naval gun—albeit one mounted on a railway car. Because of the futility, horror, and enormous cost levied in the trenches at the stalemated fronts, it is understandably common to think of “The Great War” (as it was then known) as primarily a land war. Yet in its origin, much of its conduct, and its termination, World War I was in fact a naval war. In a conflict that began as a “family feud” among Old World monarchs fought on a European landscape, the role of sea power gave one side a vital advantage that broke the bloody stalemate and proved to be the deciding factor in bringing the contestants to stop firing their guns and move their disputes from the battlefields to the halls of the Palace of Versailles.
While the Navy's mounting of five battleship guns onto railroad carriages for long-range artillery support to the Allies is an interesting aspect of the conflict, it is relatively inconsequential in the broader context. Of greater significance was the strategic impact of battleships on European and American military thinking. Except for one gargantuan—but disappointingly inconclusive—sea battle, the battleships built by the major contestants did little at sea, but the idea of battleships had far-reaching effects on the origins, planning, decisions, and conduct of that war. In the years 1898-1918, that idea spawned an around-the-world cruise by a whole fleet, incited an arms race with cascading consequences, contributed to the creation of one of the world’s most important canals, and led to misguided strategic decisions with long-term ramifications.
The Great White Fleet
In March 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt stood on the open deck of the presidential yacht Mayflower to observe a great assemblage of naval power as it passed in review. Sixteen battleships manned by nearly 15,000 American sailors steamed past the president as his famous beaming smile reflected his pleasure at the spectacle. As the first of the ships steamed by the commander in chief, Roosevelt was heard to say that it was a “magnificent fleet.” And indeed it was. With their brilliant white hulls, buff-colored superstructures, teak decks, and gilded scrollwork on their bows, they were a majestic lot that might pass for yachts belonging to the very rich, were it not for their heavy-caliber guns stowed in passive but formidable repose.
This inspiring pageant marked the beginning of what would become a 15-month circumnavigation of the globe, steaming more than 40,000 miles and stopping at 20 ports of call on six continents. Behind Roosevelt’s decision to send the bulk of his Navy on this around -the-world cruise was his acknowledgement that the Spanish-American War had marked a turning point in the role of the U.S. Navy. He believed that “we have no choice as to whether or not we shall play a great part in the world.”
Even before assuming the presidency, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt had played a pivotal role in preparing the service for that war, demonstrating his early commitment to naval strength. As President, he continued to work toward increasing the size of the Navy, enhancing its armament, and improving its efficiency.
Putting the U.S. Navy on display to the world was in keeping with Roosevelt’s famous philosophy of “speak softly and carry a big stick.” This was particularly true in relation to the growing power of Japan in the western Pacific. Recent events had strained relations between the two nations, and Roosevelt hoped that by sending this powerful fleet to Japanese waters on a peaceful mission, the Japanese would be reassured diplomatically while at the same time noting the fleet’s many big guns.
Another reason for the momentous cruise was to test his ships’ sea-keeping capabilities on long voyages and to confront the logistical challenges faced by these coal-burning behemoths. The recent odyssey of the Russian Baltic Fleet as it steamed around the Eurasian land mass during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905-06 suggested there was room for improvement in such an undertaking.
Showcasing considerable American naval power while promoting good will during port visits around the globe, the cruise of what became known as the “Great White Fleet” was, by most assessments, a success. Returning to the United States in February 1909, the endeavor received much favorable press coverage and captured the imagination of the American public. The Navy League (founded in 1902 with Roosevelt’s support) flourished, and Congress continued to provide the Navy with the necessary funding to sustain its growth and enhance its capabilities.
Arms Race
Roosevelt was a navalist long before he sent the Great White Fleet on its cruise. In 1882, while a newly elected representative to the New York State Assembly, he wrote The Naval War of 1812, a book that remains a classic of naval literature. His interest in naval affairs continued through his political career and was significantly influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan, a Navy captain who enjoyed much more success as a writer than as a seagoing naval officer. Mahan’s first book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, was published in 1890 (the first of his many books on the subject) and had an immediate and lasting effect on naval strategists and world leaders. His writings significantly influenced the naval doctrines of Germany, Britain, and Japan, as well as the United States. Mahan was a convincing proponent of “control of the sea” as essential to a nation’s security and economic prosperity. He advocated large, powerful fleets supported by overseas bases as the means to achieve that control.
In these early years of the 20th century, battleships were considered the major components of the powerful fleets called for by Mahan. Ships characterized by heavy armor and large-caliber guns began appearing in the fleets of major powers in the last decade of the 19th century. Accompanied by advanced technologies such as steam propulsion and heavy breech-loading guns, these necessarily large ships became known as battleships and were the focus of naval development as Mahan’s thinking began to take hold.
While Great Britain led the world’s navies in early battleship construction, under Roosevelt’s maritime-oriented leadership the United States began to play catch-up by adding 13 battleships to its fleet between 1906 and 1908. Even as these ships entered the U.S. fleet, they were already eclipsed by a revolutionary design emerging in Britain. In 1906, the HMS Dreadnought joined the Royal Navy and rendered the rest of the world’s battleships virtually obsolete. Previous battleship designs had included mixed batteries of guns of different calibers with different effective ranges. The Dreadnought exchanged this mixed battery for a uniformly longer-ranged main battery of ten 12-inch guns. This meant that in the early stages of battle, the Dreadnought could bring twice as many heavy guns to bear on an enemy, and that much long-ranged firepower rendered the lesser-caliber guns of her enemy useless. Further, the Dreadnought was more heavily armored and was powered by steam turbines, giving her a speed advantage over other battleships. These improvements resulted in all battleships built before Dreadnought being referred to as “pre-dreadnoughts,” a sobriquet that acknowledged their obsolescence.
The appearance of the Dreadnought further fueled the naval arms race that had been ongoing since 1897, when Germany began a concerted program to build up its navy. Spurred by Kaiser Wilhelm II’s desire for Germany to have a “place in the sun” as a world power—and by his apparent envy of his grandmother Queen Victoria’s powerful Royal Navy—Germany began a massive naval expansion program led by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. It launched its first dreadnought in 1907, followed by three more in 1908. Unwilling to forfeit its long-held naval supremacy, Britain produced 17 more dreadnoughts between 1909 and 1913. Other nations joined the race, with the United States launching two dreadnought-class battleships (the USS Michigan and USS South Carolina) in 1908, Italy following with the Dante Alighieri in 1910, and France with the Courbet in 1911. Russia also built seven and Austria-Hungary four.
The Canal
In 1898, the U.S. battleship Oregon made the heretofore longest cruise by a battleship, steaming from Bremerton, Washington, to Jupiter Inlet, Florida, by circumnavigating the South American continent. The Oregon’s voyage covered more than 15,000 miles in 81 days. As it happened, the battleship arrived in time to play a meaningful role in the Spanish-American War and enjoyed wide acclaim for having accomplished the voyage so quickly. But the voyage also illustrated a serious problem for the rising U.S. Navy. Having two major coasts divided by a continent was an obvious weakness because—despite the Oregon’s impressive endurance and speed—nearly three months can be a very long time during a war. Voyages around Cape Horn also could be navigationally challenging. The obvious solution of building and maintaining two fleets—one for each coast—was expensive, so other solutions were sought.
As early as 1513, Spanish explorer Vasco de Balboa, seeing the narrowness of the Isthmus of Panama, noted in his journals the possibility of building a canal there. Such a canal would eliminate the need to circumnavigate South America, reducing the voyage by 8,000 miles. Starting in 1881, French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps attempted the digging of a canal there, but the terrain, climate, poor planning, and some engineering miscalculations caused the project to be abandoned.
In 1897, while Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt advocated building a canal in Central America for the obvious strategic advantages a canal would provide the Navy. At first contending that Nicaragua was the best place for a canal, he was persuaded to shift his attention to Panama when medical and engineering solutions were found to some of the problems encountered by the French, such as mosquito-borne diseases and dangerous landslides. The Spanish-American War—and the voyage of the USS Oregon—further convinced him a canal was needed.
In 1903, newly independent Panama signed a treaty granting the United States exclusive and permanent control over a 10-mile wide “Canal Zone” in exchange for $10 million and a yearly annuity. American construction of the canal began in 1904 and was completed in 1914. The timing was fortuitous, because the world was about to plunge into five years of horrendous conflict that would cost much on land but be decided at sea. While the canal did not play a direct role in the coming war, its strategic importance to the emerging U.S. Navy was significant, amplifying the Navy’s potential, first as a semi-neutral service and ultimately as a direct participant.
The Coming Storm
Rising nationalism, competitive imperialism, and a complex system of alliances among the European powers contributed to the cataclysm that was initially known as the “Great War” and later became “World War I.” Economic interdependence among the world powers should have prevented the coming clash, but a tide of growing militarism, as evidenced at sea by the “Big Stick” display of the Great White Fleet and the escalating worldwide naval arms race, increased tensions and promoted false confidence among European nations that had not experienced the devastation of widespread war since the demise of Napoleon in 1815.
The result was a virtual tinderbox just waiting for the spark that came from the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The cascading series of mobilizations that followed led to an irrepressible inertia that took most of Europe into a bloody conflict that would bog down into an unbelievably costly stalemate as neither side could break the deadlock posed by the horrifying but effective networks of trenches along two fronts.
Mahan Modified
Mahan’s focus on sea power was vindicated during the Great War. But despite the emphasis on building battleships by all the world’s powers, newly arrived submarines and destroyers would largely determine the outcome. While the mere presence of the battleships affected strategic planning and decisions, these leviathans did not play a decisive role. The one time that German and British battleships engaged in combat, during the Battle of Jutland in 1915, the two fleets did significant damage to one another and claimed the lives of nearly 9,000 sailors. But the outcome was inconclusive, with both sides unconvincingly claiming victory.
Despite having built a sizable battleship fleet during the naval arms race, for most of the war the Germans were reluctant to commit it to battle. Except at Jutland, the German High Seas Fleet remained in port, leaving it to play the role of fleet in being, rather than engaging in direct combat.
But the Germans did invest in the emerging submarine technology, shifting their strategy to one of attrition by attacking the seaborne logistics chain that was vital to the Allies’ war effort and very survival. This new form of guerre de course (translated as “war of the chase” and defined as attacking an enemy’s seaborne logistics, rather than guerre d’escadre, meaning “war of the squadron,” or fleet warfare) was made possible by the development of lethal torpedoes that could strike enemy shipping beneath the waterline, frequently sinking ships. This new undersea threat spawned a whole new kind of warship—"torpedo boat destroyers” that evolved into simply “destroyers”—to counter this threat.
These relative newcomers to naval warfare defined the war by a series of moves and countermoves that eventually rendered the deadlocked land war irrelevant. Unrestricted submarine warfare gave the Germans an initial advantage by threatening the Allies’ vital supply lines. But the sinking of a British merchant ship—the Lusitania—killed a number of Americans, causing the Germans to suspend the “unrestricted” aspects of their submarine campaign when the U.S. threatened to enter the war. This suspension significantly reduced the effectiveness of German submarines. Meanwhile the Royal Navy began to apply its own form of logistical strangulation by mounting a successful blockade, while also improving its antisubmarine capabilities. Out of desperation, the Germans returned to unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, which brought the United States into the war on the side of the Allies.
“Over There”
The U.S. entry into the war marked a turning point, with a ticking clock now symbolic of the remaining course of the war. The U.S. Army was not ready for war at the time of the U.S. declaration of war on 6 April 1917—it was rated 17th in the world in size and was poorly equipped for the modern industrial warfare taking place in Europe. The Germans counted on a slow mobilization that would keep U.S. troops off the battlefield long enough for the German submarine campaign to bring the British to their knees. But the British blockade was taking its toll on the Germans as well, making beets a dreaded part of the German diet as starvation of the populace became a growing possibility.
The race against time for both sides was affected by several naval factors. The first contingent of U.S. Navy destroyers arrived in Queenstown, Ireland, on 4 May and immediately began assisting the Royal Navy in patrol and escort duties. The escort effort was also bolstered by the arrival of U.S. Rear Admiral William S. Sims, who went to work consulting with his British allies to solve the problem of unsustainable losses to Allied shipping. In the first quarter of the year, the Germans had sunk 1.3 million tons of Allied and neutral shipping, and the projected toll for just the month of April was nearly 1 million tons more. Sims proposed organizing the logistics ships into convoys that could be protected by escorting destroyers and other antisubmarine vessels. The idea was rejected on both sides of the Atlantic—traditionalists saw the clustering of ships as providing the Germans with larger targets. They also saw convoys as purely defensive and lacking the offense needed to defeat the German marauders. But after considerable persuasion by Sims, the British and Americans decided to give the idea a try. The effect was dramatic: Losses to U-boats immediately declined, dropping from 20-percent losses in March and April to less than 1 percent by summer. As convoying prevailed, Britain was saved from impending starvation, and the arrival of needed supplies dramatically improved the conditions of troops still mired down in the trenches.
As the U.S. Army began to mobilize (faster than the Germans had hoped), the Navy began transporting soldiers across the Atlantic—validating the stirring lyrics of George M. Cohan’s iconic song “Over There” that proclaimed, “The Yanks are coming.” The first contingent arrived in June, with many thousands to follow, and American “doughboys,” as they were then called, began joining their British and French allies in the trenches by October. This was a logistical challenge of unprecedented scale, and the Navy's ability to organize and protect convoys of troops was critical to the continuing Allied war effort.
Although they did not see any fleet-to-fleet actions as Mahan had advocated, U.S. battleships arrived in December to reinforce the Allied Fleet and to assist in the all-important blockade of Germany.
In June 1918, U.S. and British ships began laying mines as part of the “North Sea Mine Barrage,” a massive collaborative effort to lay 56,000 mines stretching 230 miles between Scotland and Norway, aimed at inhibiting the passage of German U-boats that were still inflicting costly damage to Allied logistics.
Railway guns arrived late in the war, and fledgling naval aviation units underwent remarkable growth. Using seaplanes, flying boats, dirigibles, and land-based aircraft, aviation participated in antisubmarine warfare, convoy escort and coastal patrol operations, reconnaissance missions, and bombing attacks on U-Boat support facilities.
The ticking clock ran out for the Germans on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. The U.S. entry into the war, with its fresh armies and its growing Navy, ended all hopes of the Germans outlasting their enemies in a war of attrition. It made their surrender inevitable.
In the end, World War I was decided by naval power. But despite the focus on battleships, it was the much smaller but potent submarines and destroyers that brought the war to its final climax. And while the Royal Navy retained its dominance in the maritime world, it was the intervention of the fledgling U.S. Navy that helped tip the balance, ending the years-long stalemate in the trenches that scarred the European landscape.
From its stunning victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898, through its growing power as displayed in the world-circling cruise of the Great White Fleet and the geographic enhancement of the Panama Canal, the U.S. Navy was clearly emerging as a major player on the aqueous part of the world stage in the first two decades of the 20th century. While its part in the First World War lacked the scale and the glory that it would find in the Second, the U.S. Navy’s contributions to the Allied victory were indisputable and put it firmly on a path that would lead—with some fits and starts—to its emergence as the preeminent naval power in the world.
